Let's Talk About Sex - African Erotic Extravaganza

The stereotype of "sexual animal" has plagued the African since the first European explorers brought home news of an over sexualized race with inexplicable erotic inclinations and passions. To this day, there are many people including some Africans themselves who believe that what has been singled out as a distinct "African sexuality" is nature's strongest proof of their racial inferiority and HIV/AIDS is God's punishment and judgment on an excessively permissive sexual culture. The mere mention of African sexuality conjures in most people the common notions of wild, animal, primitive, savage, ecstatic, excessive, out of control, dangerous on one hand and exotic, sex goddess, love machine, spontaneous, "in the moment" on the other etc. This contradictory image of the African (and of Africa for that matter) - that of a degenerate entity on the one hand, and of a source of regeneration on the other - occupies in the Western subconscious a sort of "delicious fright" and engages most people in the approach-avoidance-approach dance. Even now as the West turns to indigenous sacred traditions, wisdom and values as a potential fountain of nourishment to parched souls of the post-religious West, many Africans are still ashamed of this aspect of their heritage. What was once an open and guilt-free expression of sensuality and sexuality is now a culture off stone-like silence (taboo) around issues of sex and sexual intercourse especially among the "educated" and those who want to be seen as "westernized." A silence which both Western and African scholars, researchers, politicians and the international aid community have condemned for perpetuating the spread of HIV/AIDS but which silences few are willing to further explore to find out what the "noises" filling those silences are saying, and to provide a platform for more appropriate responses. Studies of African sexuality mostly carried out by Westerners and taken out of the social context in which they are naturally embedded have tended to rely on particular problematics imbued with assumptions about African culture. These studies tend to focus on the "oddness of the other" held up against a Western model. They focus on HIV/AIDS, the horrors of female circumcision, the traumas of armed violence and rape, sex work and trafficking. The African woman especially has been criticized by the "feminist movement" for wanting sex. Apparently because she thinks she can willingly engage in sex she is participating in her own oppression. African women who are willing to have sex and refuse to embrace the "Western " way of granting or withholding the treat of sex as a means of training men to give them what they want are weak minded fools who have internalized their own oppression because they're unable to know any better and patriarchy controls their every move. Western research on African sexuality has paid far too limited attention to the African's point of view completely denying and negating it, and insisting that Africans not only accede to, but adopt, the Western point of view. The interpretation of the sensory experience, sexual perceptions and practices is based entirely on the perceptions of Western reality. Cultural stereotyping of Africans, especially African women demands that they dissociate themselves from any enjoyment of their own sexuality lest men "stop buying cows, because they could get the milk for free." This deeply entrenched subjective view of African sexuality fails to recognize the positive aspects of African culture and how these specific aspects have uniquely enriched the lives of African people - and in many ways may well provide the much needed spin to our North American shame-based, guilt-ridden, body despising,